Activities

1. After teaching a class on some of Brecht's techniques, divide the class into groups, each with a focus on a particular technique (such as Gestus, Alienation, Narration/Song, Breaking the Fourth Wall). The students reflect on what they have seen in the performance of Mother Courage and Her Children, recalling examples of their particular technique from the show to use as examples. Each group works towards a presentation of their technique with examples from the play to show to the rest of the class.
2. This activity assists students to understand the detachment they must have from their characters when performing Brecht. Break the class into groups of three. Appoint person A, B and C. Person A tells person B something they did on the weekend. Person B then retells this story to Person C. (eg Shelley went to the swimming pool on the weekend and bought an icecream ...) Swap the roles around so that all students have an opportunity to both tell and retell another's story. Get some of the students to perform the task in front of the entire class. Discuss how they are presenting someone else's story, how they change their voices when impersonating others etc. Point out that we, as an audience, can listen to a story and know that it is just Person B telling Person A's story. Person B is not trying to pretend to be Person A, they are merely retelling the story.
3. This activity is designed to distance the actor from the part they are playing. Choose a section from the script of Mother Courage and Her Children and appoint characters to students in the class. Ask the students to read through the play as they normally would. Discuss how they read it, whether they gave their characters certain voices, were they trying to be realistic etc. Read through the play again, but this time get the actors to read the stage directions as well. Once read, discuss how this changed the way the script was received by the 'audience' (ie the rest of the class). How did they change the way they presented their characters? Did the audience see a character, or did they see their classmate pretending to be a character?
4. This activity focuses on trying to show the actors opinion towards their character and is a complex technique to develop, however with proper scaffolding and continual analysis of what they're doing it could be performed with younger students. Students are given sections of the script from Mother Courage and Her Children (or another Brechtian text they may be studying) and are asked to transpose the lines into the past. So, rather than just saying a line, they must now say 'then Kattrin replied ...' or 'in astonishment the Chaplain proclaimed ...'. You might need to practice with this first. Once the students have mastered this technique, tell them that they must show the audience that they, the student, love their character. This emotion will come out most strongly in the wording they choose to transpose the script into the past. Once they have tried this, change the emotion, so that the students must show they are jealous of their character, then angry towards them, etc. Throughout the duration of this exercise, discuss how they are showing an emotion to the audience separate to what their character feels. In this way, they themselves get to comment on the action through their characters.